on kink and the beginning of such

I think I always knew that I was kinky, although I didn't have a word for it. The first obvious clue was my utter fascination/obsession with the movie Labyrinth. My fixation was a common one in my age group; it was not how much I liked the film but rather how much I liked it when Jareth threatened and bullied and attempted to seduce a teenage girl. Take this statement for example: "I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I shall be your slave." Look, Mom - David Bowie is talking about power exchange in a clearly sexual context. Can I go see Jim Henson's next movie?

I started to really figure out my kinky self as a young teenager, with my well-read copy of Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, the YA version of the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves. The truly brilliant thing about the book was that it had excerpts throughout, written by actual teenagers, about their own sexual experiences. I vividly remember one girl's candid description of a fantasy she had, about a strange man grabbing her on the street and raping her in the alley*. And I read and reread the story another girl told of riding through a carnival fun-house with a strange boy, and letting him feel her up in the darkness.

*Thinking about it now, it is an amazing and wonderful thing how non-judgemental the book was on this topic. The author(s) talked about fantasy as being a safe way to explore scary ideas, and emphasized that a person can have a fantasy about being raped without actually wanting to be raped. I suspect this book helped me more than I've ever realized.

By middle school, I was having my own secret fantasies, about boys I liked sneaking into my room at night. No imagined bondage, no spanking, nothing like that. Just a boy, and the key to my door, and the sound of the door closing behind him. I was also enjoying the incredibly detailed* sex scenes in Jean M. Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series. Of particular note was the scene where our handsome hero is carefully and gently--but determinedly--deflowering a fifteen year old girl. The sentence about her frightened eyes staring up at him as he casually unlaced her blouse was the direct cause of my first orgasm, years before any boys would manage to make me come.

*and, I realize now, without shame in the physical act of sex. People fucking, and seeming to like it! How novel. Jean M Auel is probably part of the reason I starting writing porn in the first place. That's weird to think about.

For most of high school I was able to suppress any naughty feelings that seemed too, well, naughty, and just have fun making out with my boyfriends. And when you're in love with a sweet boy and you're 16 years old it's pretty easy to go with the flow. It didn't come up again (so to speak, ha ha) until I met a troublemaker at - where else? - summer school. He had a safety pin in his ear and wore a lot of black and held me down on the bed when we fucked. Of course, he was also an intellectual black hole, and I doubt he knew why he held me down.

But I was starting to know.